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Category Archives: Plugins

For those who are contributing to the client or writing client side plugins, things just got a little easier. Today we committed to master an update that adds a feature to the client test page which shows all the client pub/sub events that occur and who is subscribed.

The client has a loosely coupled architected based on top of a pub/sub model. Pub/sub has many advantages, but one of its biggest disadvantages is visibility into what events are occurring, the data being passed and who is subscribed. This tab reveals all of this information and more. It even updates live as events are occurring and as the client lifecycle moves on.

Here is a preview of what you can expect:

At the moment, this tab is currently only available in the client test page. In the future, we are looking at the possibility of shipping this within the server implementation and allow developers to toggle it on and off as required. But this will be done some time in the future based on feedback.

With Glimpse, we can peek into all things server side. We can inspect ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, Entity Framework, ADO.NET and much more through plugins. Since many developers are making use of Windows Azure to host their web applications, we are happy to announce a first public preview of two Windows Azure tabs in Glimpse!

The Glimpse.WindowsAzure package will display runtime information for a Cloud Service or Web Site. Glimpse.WindowsAzure.Storage collects and displays information about traffic from and to storage and gives best-practice advice. More information about the information offered through these new tabs can be read on Maarten’s blog.

It would be great if you could give these two packages a try and give us feedback! Here’s how:

Note that the Windows Azure tabs are still in a preview phase and rough edges may be in there. We’re still looking at load balanced environments. You can implement Glimpse’s IPersistenceStore but we would like to have a zero-configuration setup in place.

All of this activity is really great for Glimpse and the Glimpse community, but it can make finding the right Glimpse components for your project a bit daunting. (Although the NuGet team has recently improved the search syntax to help this problem along, it still isn’t enough.)

So today, standing on the shoulders of the giants over at MyGet.org, we are releasing the Glimpse Extension Gallery and Extension Gallery Feed.

The Glimpse Extension Gallery is simply a listing of available Glimpse extension on our site. It’s still early days with the gallery, but it should get better and better in the coming months.

What I’m really excited about is the Extension Gallery Feed which allows users to get a special package source of just Glimpse extensions, which looks like this:

Whats more, we’ve made adding this package source to Visual Studio a breeze by leveraging the Package Source Discovery specification on getGlimpse.com. This specification allows you to easily add our feed to Visual Studio by issuing the following two commands from the Package Manager Console:

In an effort to try and give the community as much time to respond as possible, if you have noticed already IGlimpsePlugin has had some changes made to it. These changes will go out with release 0.83+.

It is not our intention to make this a pain for people who have already created plugins, but we really felt that this was a change that needed to happen sooner rather than later.

In an effort to ensure that Glimpse is rock solid and “future proof” we have been working hard at getting our test coverage up. In the process of doing this we found that having plugins (IGlimpsePlugin) depend on HttpApplication was a mistake. HttpApplication limits the ability to unit test plugins as it virtual requires us to have a real context.

Obviously this isn’t good for testing and what we should have depended on in the first place is HttpContextBase. HttpContextBase can easily be mocked and hence allows our plugins testable. In the long run this is also good for 3rd party plugin developers as it means that you can easily test as well.

A release will be coming within the next week and we would encourage any developers who have created plugins to adjust their code to cater for the coming change.

Moving forward we don’t anticipate any more changes that any more changes will occur, but this is always a possibility as we are still officially in Beta.

If you have any feedback or comments please let us know. We really do want to make Glimpse the best possible tool and really help facilitate people solving real problems.